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The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra is facing an issue which few major orchestras have ever had to deal with ... their music director, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, has announced that she is taking maternity leave from July -> November this year.

In 2019 the Danish conductor Thomas Dausgaard will take over in Seattle and leave The Swedish Chamber Orchestra that he has led for 20 years. The clarinetist Martin Fröst will take over the Swedish Chamber Orchestra after Dausgaard. Dausgaard has recorded Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Wagner, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Tchaikovsky and Bruckner with the Swedish Chamber orchestra.

So far Dausgaard has only recorded a Carl Nielsen CD and a Mahler cd for The Seattle Symphony orchestra.
(This is in fact old news, but I found no mention of it on this thread)

Most people around town did not think this was going to happen, and saw the high number of guest conductors we've been seeing at the Symphony as a sort of audition period (I remember a similar time in Phoenix, and seeing Michael Christie before he took that job). Salonen was discounted as an option (from observers, but clearly not from those involved in the process!) assuming he still didn't want another music director job in the USA.

Esa-Pekka Salonen's first concert after the announcement will be much sooner than anyone could anticipated: he is filling in for Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. She was scheduled to conducted in January but postponed a few months back. Salonen will be conducting a mostly new program: Four Legends from the Kalevala by Sibelius will still be heard but Tchaikovsky's 1st Piano Concerto has been replaced by Metacosmos by Þorvaldsdóttir (which EPS premiered with the NYPO in February) and Also sprach Zarathustra by Strauss.

I already had a ticket for the chance to see MGT and have kept it hoping for the best. This works!